If Emma Woodhouse weren’t so busy mucking up other people’s love lives, she might consider a career in politics. The lady would have an instant mission statement, backed up by a blame-deflecting shrug and a smile: “Mistakes were made.”

Whether she cops to her blunders or not, the heroine of the Old Globe’s latest musical makes plenty of them. But aside from having a title whose weight could take down a marquee, “Jane Austen’s Emma: A Musical Romantic Comedy” barely errs at all.

Here’s one measure of an effective love story: It induces in the viewer a giddy and irresistible sense of affection. For a walnut.

That’s the one held aloft in comic devotion by the rapt Harriet Smith (endlessly appealing Dani Marcus) in the Globe production each time she sings “Mr. Robert Martin,” her ode to the shambling, hayseed Romeo who gave her the thing.

The song — a melodic, piano-driven number that’s both fervent and humorous — symbolizes as well as anything the savvy adaptation by “Emma” composer-writer-lyricist Paul Gordon. The tone of his show (now getting its fourth full production) treads nimbly between paying homage to Austen and poking affectionate fun at everything from the baffling family arrangements in her works to the fusty manners and mores of upper-crusty Brits.

Zipping along on the kinetic direction and choreography of Jeff Calhoun (of La Jolla Playhouse’s recent “Bonnie & Clyde”), the piece streamlines the 1815 Austen original, dropping some characters and subplots and paraphrasing the text heavily while staying true to the central story.

What results is a musical that’s just about a total pleasure, and maybe more fun for a contemporary audience than it has a real right to be.

“Emma” was famously remade for modern senses and sensibilities with the 1995 movie “Clueless,” which reset the story to Beverly Hills. Gordon keeps his version in Regency-era England, but brings time-shifting variety to the score, from a vintage British music-hall vibe to melodic pop balladry. It’s all played in sumptuous tones by a bigger-than-it-sounds (if synth-assisted) orchestral quartet.

The show’s mix of the tart and the tender is an inspired fit for Patti Murin, who plays the hapless matchmaker Emma. She’s a wonder of smugness early in the show on such numbers as “Should We Ever Meet,” with its beautifully self-delusional line, “He is likely to like me.” She also sings with plenty of playfulness and range.

(One small misfire, though no fault of Murin’s: Her Act 1 line “Snobbery and arrogance only look good on me” comes before Emma has earned anything near that kind of self-awareness.)

The story is driven by the friction between Emma and her friend Mr. Knightley (Adam Monley), who sees the chaos Emma causes by, among other misguided ideas, talking the sweetly obliging Harriet out of marrying Robert Martin (Adam Daveline). In Monley’s understated portrayal, Knightley is a knight armored in sarcasm; he makes up in straight talk what he lacks in dash.

Tobin Ost’s eye-popping set — dominated by a huge maze of hedgerows tipped up like a pyramid — is an inventive metaphor for the story’s many twists, and also sets up a nice visual joke of cast members popping up like chess pieces (or prairie dogs). A turntable moves people and props in and out swiftly, although its heavy use can make scenes seem as if they’re set in a subway station.

One highlight among highlights: Marcus’ rendition (and deliciously table-turning reprise) of the song “Humiliation,” which is like the flip side of the perky “Popular” from the musical “Wicked.” Marcus’ sweetly mortified Harriet is, in a nutshell, adorable.